Musical conception of abstract film - The case of Viking Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony
Bengt Edlund · Lund University Publications (Lund University) · 2002
The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the belief in the kinship of the arts were passed on from late romanticism to many of the modernist movements in the first decades of the twentieth century. Thus artists and film-makers wished to accomplish a fusion that transferred the achievements of non-figurative art to the new film medium, swayed by the constraints of realist story-telling. But abstract film needed principles that could organize its visual flow, and some theorists thought that music, the most abstract of the arts, could be of avail. This paper will present an analysis in musical terms of Viking Eggeling's abstract film the Diagonal Symphony, and it will be shown both that he relied on the most widely used formal pattern of classical music, the sonata form, to mould his only film, and that he employed a number of other musical devices to give interest and coherence to its details. The account will start, however, with a short biographical sketch and with some pertinent general information on the film.